In recent years, a cloud computing has been proposed as a new business model. By shifting to a pay-s-you-go type system such as Saas (Software as a Service) based on cloud computing, many IT (Information Technology) service enterprises are aiming for realization of a system that has a high flexibility for system management cost reduction and for business content change.
As a technology for realizing such cloud computing, a virtualization technology is being paid attention. A virtualization technology is suitable to perform scale in/scale out required for cloud computing flexibly, and it has a high affinity with an idea of cloud computing. Such flow toward cloud computing and virtualization also exists in an application server area.
An application server is a server which can carry out no smaller than one piece of deployed application software. Such application server accepts a processing request from a client, carries out application software based on the accepted processing request and provides a processing result to the client.
Such application servers are provided in a data center or the like in large numbers. A technology for managing a great number of application server groups used in a data center as a virtual system for each service while concealing each real system is being desired.
As a technology which realizes such desire at present, a related technology which performs grouping of distributed application servers for each service, and performs integrated control of the grouped application servers is known. In this related technology, a management dedicated server generates a virtual server instance which virtually represents an actual/real process of each application server. This virtual server instance is mapped to a service provided by application software deployed in an application server. This management dedicated server can generate a plurality of virtual server instances for one application server. The management dedicated server manages the virtual server instances in a manner grouping the instances. By handling the virtual server instances in the management dedicated server, a server administrator who manages application server groups in a data center can manage the application server groups in one lump while maintaining the consistency among application servers in an identical group. Thus, this related technology enables to reduce the operation cost of distributed application server groups.
Patent document 1 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-251890) discloses a technology which performs identical operation setting to servers in an identical group. The technology disclosed in this patent document 1 introduces an agent for performing operation setting of a server into a plurality of servers respectively, and performs grouping of these agents. An agent registered with a group newly acquires the operation setting of the other agents in the same group and applies it to a server into which the agent is introduced.
However, in the related technology which performs integrated control of application server groups which have been grouped, a problem occurs when it is required to make a plurality of virtual server instances representing an identical application server belong to a plurality of operation groups. Specifically, in a large-scale virtualization system, there is a desire to make a plurality of services provided on an identical application server belong to different operation groups respectively. However, when an operation group is different, it is expected that the operation policy of an application server is also different. Here, an operation policy of an application server is a policy or the like about an extraction setting of an access log of a web container, for example. Such application server operation policy is realized by a setting value that can be set for each application server.
However, a plurality of virtual server instances representing an identical application server are mapped to an identical actual/real process. Therefore, the plurality of virtual server instances representing an identical application server cannot have setting values different from each other. Accordingly, when the plurality of virtual server instances representing an identical application server are tried to be made belong to different operation groups, it can be easily expected that a collision occurs between setting values of an application server. Thus, in this related technology, there is a problem that it is difficult to make a plurality of virtual server instances representing an identical application server operate with setting values different from each other.
Also, in the technology disclosed in patent document 1, identical operation setting can be easily applied to each server into which an agent which belongs to an identical group is introduced respectively. However, patent document 1 does not disclose about introducing different agents in one server and making them perform different pieces of operation setting respectively.